


Everything I Love Gets Lost In Drawers

by roomeight



Category: Blur
Genre: Britpop, Damon Albarn - Freeform, M/M, blur - Freeform, blur slash, graham coxon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 19:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8679976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roomeight/pseuds/roomeight
Summary: A short little drabble based on the song 'Slow Show' by The National, written from Graham's perspective and set in modern day. Written in stream-of-consciousness style about Graham feeling unsure about his sexuality and second-guessing the choices he's made.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I needed a break from my long fic to just write something different, and I've had this one in my head for a while. Thank you for reading. xx <3

We thought this would work, but we were wrong.

To think that two people could salvage a mess like this.

What a joke.

Your fingertips traced the bottom of my fingertips. I felt the hard jagged surface of the sidewalk underneath my bare hands, splitting into me.

You were a character study if there was any. You stood there, a loose cigarette clinging to your lips, expressionless. You had to have everything your way, didn't you? You perfect human being. I hated you.

No one ever tells you that it’s inevitable that one day you will hate the one you love. It's those moments in-between, those loose, beautiful, intangible moments that you cherish. Everything else is just reality.

I remember the first time you kissed me. I thought you were joking. Your eyes lit up. You were the first person I talked to the day after my 11th birthday, and you had passion, so much passion. I envied you, and your confidence, the way you were so uncool but you didn’t care. You believed in magic and Hermann Hesse. You said you loved me and I’d never heard anyone say that to me before.

I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything at all. I just watched you, for 36 years. Sometimes up close, sometimes from far away.  

I didn’t know how good we had it back then. I didn’t know it wouldn’t last. 

And I let everything we had run through my fingers like so much water.

You were so confident in your sexuality, I was not. When I sucked your cock for the first time I tried to think of women, because admitting an attraction to you would have meant this was real, that I had to make a decision. My brain was confused by everything you did to me. We held each other’s hands when we were in bed and gave one another black eyes when we were out of it. I wanted to love you back then, when we were so young, but I didn’t know how. I don’t think you did either.

Even now, when I play my guitar I hear your voice singing in my head, even when you aren’t there, and you haven’t been for years. You and I, we always had a weird sort of telepathy that I could never explain.

And for whatever karmic reason, now here you are again, sitting across a table, returning to me like dust settling under damaged bones.

And for what? Some attachment, some old notion or sense of companionship? An old ship with no sails can not sail. The sea would leak into its stinking rotten flesh.

Every memory I have of you is bittersweet.

And no, we’re not the same people anymore. Whatever scars we gave one another lay visceral and barren on our bodies. When we were younger we used to wear them as pride, and now we wear them as old age and some simile or facet of wisdom, but really all it was was painful endurance.

I feel your arms embrace me as they once did. A familiar longing wells up inside my throat. Absence of space. Warmth. Then it passes, gone. The cherry on your cigarette bobs as you turn your head away and look down at your dingy wristwatch. You were always terrible at dressing yourself. Lingering in some cosmic bohemian hip hop hipster phase that you never grew out of.

What are we now? What remains? I watch the minute movements of the hand on the face of your watch, each moment ticking away at the cellular decay of our lives. Why do we think anything matters at all? Now I wonder to myself, maybe I should have said I loved you after all.

Even something as vast and omnipotent as the ocean changes. We were different people back then, different oceans.

I remember the exact day we stopped. It’s cut into my memory with such violence that I don’t believe I will ever will myself to forget it. Why my father didn’t hit you when he found us together, to be honest, I’ll never know. I think we all wanted to forget what happened that day.

I place my hand on your knee. It's a habitual movement, thoughtless and based purely on human need. My fingers shake, anxious with the realization that things have changed and I am overstepping my bounds.

Why are we such needy creatures? Why do we need the whole world to be our mother?

When I hand you the polaroid photo of us I’ve had in the bottom of my drawer for so many years now, buried beneath all the things I tried to forget you with, you smile. I see the light in your eyes again as you say, “I remember us.”

You kiss me again and it feels like the sun. It’s brief, painfully brief, a friendly kiss instead of a lover’s kiss like it used to be, but it’s everything to me for all the things I can no longer say to you.

  
  
  


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